These individuals might refer to themselves as transgender, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming. The differences between male and female sexes are anatomical and physiological. For instance, male and female genitalia, both internal and external are different. Similarly, the levels and types of hormones present in male and female bodies are different. Genetic factors define the sex of an individual. Women have 46 chromosomes including two Xs and men have 46 including an X and a Y. The Y chromosome is dominant and carries the signal for the embryo to begin growing testes. Both men and women have testosterone , estrogen , and progesterone. However, women have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone, and men have higher levels of testosterone.

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The invention of genders
We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. Researchers found that more than fish species can change their sex.
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What do women want? It has been at the centre of numerous books, articles and blog posts, and no doubt the cause of countless agonised ponderings by men and women alike. But despite decades spent trying to crack this riddle, researchers have yet to land on a unified definition of female desire, let alone come close to fully understanding how it works. Now, scientists are increasingly beginning to realise that female desire cannot be summarised in terms of a single experience: it varies both between women and within individuals, and it spans a highly diverse spectrum of manifestations. But more recent evidence reveals that differences between the sexes may actually be more nuanced or even non-existent, depending on how you define and attempt to measure desire. Some studies have even found that men in relationships are as likely as women to be the member of the couple with the lower level of sexual desire. For decades, researchers had assumed men have more sexual desire than women - an idea rejected by recent findings Credit: Olivia Howitt. But when the question is revised to ask about in-the-moment feelings — the amount of desire experienced in the midst of a sexual interaction — scientists find no difference between men and women.
Sex differences in humans have been studied in a variety of fields. In humans, biological sex consists of five factors present at birth: the presence or absence of the SRY gene an intronless sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome , the type of gonads , the sex hormones , the internal reproductive anatomy such as the uterus , and the external genitalia. Phenotypic sex refers to an individual's sex as determined by their internal and external genitalia, expression of secondary sex characteristics, and behavior. The sex of the individual can be defined in different ways, giving rise to different conceptual frameworks about what determines sex. A subset of such differences is hypothesized to be the product of the evolutionary process of sexual selection. Sex differences in medicine include sex-specific diseases, which are diseases that occur only in people of one sex ; and sex-related diseases, which are diseases that are more usual to one sex, or which manifest differently in each sex. For example, certain autoimmune diseases may occur predominantly in one sex, for unknown reasons. Gender-based medicine, also called "gender medicine", is the field of medicine that studies the biological and physiological differences between the human sexes and how that affects differences in disease. Traditionally, medical research has mostly been conducted using the male body as the basis for clinical studies. More recently, medical research has started to understand the importance of taking the sex into account as the symptoms and responses to medical treatment may be very different between sexes.